Assault, gunfire, stabbing: San Francisco’s front-line workers don’t feel safe

It happened after noon as people were leaving work for lunch.&nbsp;



A car pulled up alongside another vehicle parked on Leavenworth Street near Golden Gate Avenue. Shots rang out through San Francisco’s rough-and-tumble Tenderloin neighborhood. When police arrived on the scene, they found two people suffering from gunshot wounds. A third victim later walked into a city hospital seeking treatment for a gunshot.



The Oct. 12 shooting rattled employees of Tom Waddell Urban Health Center, a medical facility on that street corner that serves some of the Tenderloin’s most vulnerable—homeless people and residents of supportive housing.



“Some employees felt traumatized, and they left and went home to just process the situation,” said Cheryl Thornton, an eligibility supervisor at the clinic who was working that day. “But others stayed working, because it’s happened before.”



Plus, there were still patients to treat.



Though a shooting at the footsteps of a public health clinic is a rare occurrence in San Francisco, it wasn’t the first time that the problems of the city’s struggling Downtown had endangered the lives of the people tasked with alleviating them.



For Laronda Mayfield, who works at the city’s Human Services Agency (HSA), the worst moment came two years ago, when a man charged through a plastic glass window over the front desk, destroying computers and forcing her and a social worker to flee out the back door. It took six sheriff’s deputies to restrain him, she said.



“That was one of the latest horrifying incidents I’ve experienced here since the pandemic,” Mayfield told The Standard.&nbsp;



The problems faced by these workers—many of whom are city employees—came to greater public attention in September, when an inhabitant of the Windsor residential hotel <a href="https://develop.sfstandard.com/2023/09/13/man-arrested-after-stabbing-person-multiple-times-in-tenderloin/">stabbed a social worker four times</a> in an attack the district attorney believes to be an anti-LGBTQ+ hate crime.&nbsp;



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="4032" height="3024" src="https://content-develop.sfstandard.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/IMG_4067.jpg?w=2500" alt="The text seems to be a description of a picture. Here's a clearer and corrected version:

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In the aftermath, the victim’s union, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1021, <a href="https://develop.sfstandard.com/2023/09/15/stabbing-of-san-francisco-social-worker-could-have-been-prevented-union-says/">said the attack could have been prevented</a> had the city taken threats against the social worker more seriously.&nbsp;



It’s a view that many workers on the front lines of issues like homelessness, addiction and mental health echo: They need more protection.



“You’re always on guard because of the neighborhood and what’s happening,” Thornton said.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-unsafe-environments">Unsafe Environments</h2>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="2007" height="1339" src="https://content-develop.sfstandard.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/2023_oct_31_violencecityemployees_0267a.jpg" alt="Cheryl Thornton stands on the sidewalk facing off camera with pedestrians congregating behind her outside of her place of work in San Francisco. " class="wp-image-218652" srcset="https://content-develop.sfstandard.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/2023_oct_31_violencecityemployees_0267a.jpg 2007w, https://content-develop.sfstandard.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/2023_oct_31_violencecityemployees_0267a.jpg?resize=300,200 300w, https://content-develop.sfstandard.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/2023_oct_31_violencecityemployees_0267a.jpg?resize=768,512 768w, https://content-develop.sfstandard.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/2023_oct_31_violencecityemployees_0267a.jpg?resize=1536,1025 1536w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 2007px) 100vw, 2007px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Pedestrians stand on a curb during a portrait session with Cheryl Thornton, left, outside the Tom Waddell Urban Health Clinic in San Francisco on Oct. 31, 2023. </figcaption></figure>



Workers like these perform some of the most important—and least glamorous—jobs in San Francisco. They are tasked with keeping vulnerable people housed, fed and healthy.



“They are not the highest-paid people in the city, but they are the ones who are the glue to the city,” said Theresa Rutherford, president of SEIU Local 1021, which represents many of these employees.



But as the Covid pandemic and the proliferation of cheap, deadly fentanyl exacerbated problems like homelessness and addiction, these workers increasingly have felt threatened.



For Mayfield, the irate client hurtling through the plastic glass was just one of many incidents she and her colleagues have faced in the last few years.



She has worked in the Human Services Agency’s piebald Moorish Revival building on Mission Street since the agency moved there in 1992. Her job is to help low-income residents access benefits like supplemental nutrition and MediCal.



Her work is so important that she was one of the employees coming into the office every day during the pandemic. But that means she also saw the neighborhood deteriorate before her eyes as Covid shuttered San Francisco.



The block of Mission between Eighth and Ninth streets is a hotspot for homelessness and drug use in the South of Market neighborhood. She says it is traumatic and terrifying to see people using fentanyl and fighting in the streets outside.



“It just breaks my heart every single time,” Mayfield said.



It has gotten so bad that few HSA employees go out to lunch anymore or exit the building until their shift is over, she added.



But although the HSA building is guarded by a sheriff&#8217;s deputy daily, the neighborhood’s broader ills sometimes cross its threshold.



Last year, a man overdosed in the building’s lobby. When paramedics arrived on the scene and tried to move him, a gun fell out of his sock, Mayfield said. Another coworker was attacked on the day she returned from maternity leave.



“She didn’t even make it in the door,” she said. “I haven’t seen her since.”



In October, Mayfield turned to the city’s Human Services Commission to ask for help. “What is it going to take for us to get help?” she asked, according to <a href="https://www.sfhsa.org/sites/default/files/media/document/migrated/10.27.22%20HSC%20meeting%20minutes.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">meeting minutes</a>.



In an email, the HSA told The Standard that it has contracted with Urban Alchemy, a nonprofit focused on improving public safety, to provide street monitoring, safety and de-escalation services. It has also assigned additional guards at the entrance, enhanced screening protocols at the metal detector and keeps in contact with police about safety and street conditions.&nbsp;



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The situation is similarly difficult at Tom Waddell. According to Thornton, one of her colleagues was physically assaulted and knocked to the ground while taking a cigarette break on the back steps. The Leavenworth side of the building—part of an area known as Pill Hill—is the site of many tents and a lot of open-air drug dealing and use.



In an email to The Standard, the Department of Public Health admitted that Tom Waddell is the “clinic most affected by violence in the area due to its location.” In the coming weeks, it plans to fit Tom Waddell’s public-facing windows with ballistic-proof acrylic overlays.&nbsp;



The health department said it holds biweekly meetings with clinic leadership to address safety issues.&nbsp;



The department “has been regularly surveying Tom Waddell Urban Health Center staff about safety concerns including increased building safety, potential security escorts and opportunities to receive trauma services, which are already accessible to them through SFDPH,” it said.



The Department of Human Resources added that, in agreement with SEIU Local 1021, the city had deployed signs in work sites across San Francisco to inform members of the public that assaulting a city employee is a punishable offense under California law.&nbsp;



Despite those efforts, Tom Waddell remains a difficult work environment.



“We have encounters,” Thornton said. “Not all the encounters end up be...

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